Edwin Wiley Grove

Grove's fortune came from making quinine bearable. His Tasteless Chill Tonic suspended quinine in a flavored syrup that had to be shaken, and though hardly tasteless it beat other malaria remedies and became a best seller. The Paris Medicine Company formed in 1886 with local investors and moved to St. Louis in 1889. Bromo Quinine, among the first tablets for the common cold, followed. By 1900 the company was the world's largest consumer of quinine, with branch offices from Toronto to Buenos Aires. Bristol-Myers bought the firm, renamed Grove Laboratories in 1934, in 1957.

What the plaque says

Edwin Wiley Grove 1850-1927 Born in Hardeman County, E.W. Grove came to Paris, Tennessee, in 1874 as a pharmacist. He developed in 1878 Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic, which was sold worldwide through the Paris Medicine Company, as a malaria treatment and preventative. By 1891, Grove moved his company to St. Louis, marketing some of the first cold tablets, Grove's Bromo Quinine. He built Grove Park Inn and Grove Arcade in Asheville, North Carolina. After many business and philanthropic ventures in the South, Grove died in his Battery Park Hotel in Asheville. He was buried in the Paris City Cemetery.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge — 11 mi
  A 51,000-acre refuge along Kentucky Lake and the Tennessee River, created in 1945 for migratory birds, with a visitor center in Springville and a drowned Archaic site nearby.
• Paris Landing State Park — 16 mi
  A Kentucky Lake state park on the site of a Tennessee River steamboat landing, created after the 1944 TVA dam drowned a sulphur-spring resort.
• Patsy Cline Crash Site Memorial — 19 mi
  An engraved rock off Mt. Carmel Road near Camden marking where a small plane carrying Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins went down on March 5, 1963.
• Johnsonville State Historic Park — 26 mi
  A Tennessee River park on the site of a Union supply depot shelled in November 1864 and of the town later drowned by Kentucky Lake, with earthworks, a railroad bed and an African American cemetery.

More markers nearby

• James Davis Porter — steps away
• John Wesley Crockett — steps away
• David Edward Jackson — steps away
• John DeWitt Clinton Atkins — steps away